Fallen Vagrant - (fanfic)

She stops by the door, notes the pressure plate with caution. The hard light keeping the room sealed is gone, and she peers in around the corner until she sees the vagrant’s body. It’s not in good shape. Not decomposed, not quite, the way bacteria shies away from the corridors keeps her guessing as to the age of most things within.

Io hums around near her head. It hovers a little further out, just enough for it to blink red at the sight of the body. Inside, to the left of the body, sits an iron box long since rusted. And a little to the right, some torn up floorplates. The plating removed cleanly, not by claws or weapons.

“Yeah, dead for awhile,” she says. Certainly enough blood to confirm that much, the steel stained with the old brown color. “This is... not what I’d been hoping for, Io.”

Io blinks red, drifts into the room to rest over the vagrant’s corpse. Flashes blue.

She walks up, her pistol drawn. Stops closer to the vagrant, seeing the desiccated skull. “He wasn’t really human,” she says. The vagrant’s skull is a little too much like a helmet. “Who knows if he’s really our vagrant. I don’t see his cape.” But if the door’s open already... “Io, do you think someone else came through here already?”

With a high pitched beep, Io hovers to the left. Coming to a rest atop the box the vagrant had been leaning against. Who cares, look here instead, Io seemed to say.

“Right,” she says, kneeling by the box. She takes a crowbar from her pack and thrusts it under the top lid. She presses down until the lid pops, and works it off the rest of the way. She tosses the plate aside, the iron clattering across the floor.

She sighs as she pulls out, piece by piece, the remains of a map. The frame split and burnt and corroded, so that even reassembling the thing with her wrist-welder fails to get the whole map’s holo to appear.

Under the fragments of the map, though, a cube key. She holds it up to Io, who processes it in a second, the cube key slipping from her fingers. “Think it’s to the door,” she says, making sure the box was still empty. “No sign of the...”

Io speeds across the room, toward the popped open floor plate.

“Ah!” She says, grinning. She crouch walks over and examines the bits of wiring underneath. An intricate array of cables, some thinner than her hair. And the few blocky processors through which the wires run. In an operating system, the cables and processors would be glowing or buzzing. But this system is dead like the vagrant. She takes out her knife and sections a bit of the wires out, until she can pick up a processor without uprooting the whole tangle.

Io drifts down and beeps, connecting to the severed processor with a slender wire. Some servo in the processor whirs, shaking her hand, before dying again.

“Well?” She asks.

Io’s light flickers off.

She waits, now concerned. A virus? I should have been more careful.

With a start, Io’s light turns green, and flashes excitedly.

She smiles.

“Transia.”

Transia turns on her heels, nearly falling backward as she draws her pistol and aims it at the vagrant’s animated skull. “Fuck,” she whispers. Then, louder, “Consul said you’d wait for a spy.”

The skull turns, a few degrees toward Transia. When the vagrant speaks, his jaw does not move. “It’s been a few hundred years longer for me, than you. A long time to sit here, decomposing. Waited so long, someone else swept through. Didn’t notice I was still present. Like you didn’t.”

“Well,” Transia says. “Sorry.”

A chuckle from within the ribcage. “Just came in and took my cape. Looking for something else. Seemed content with the cape, though.”

Transia smiles, though she knows how this will end. She’s had the pistol level with the skull until now, and she lowers the barrel toward the vagrant’s chest. “Well, I found the Consul’s desired processor,” she says. “You can rest easy now.”

“I think he was important,” the vagrant says.

“Who?”

“The drifter,” he says.

“I’ll tell him you said that, if I see him,” she takes a deep breath. Appraises the shriveled remains of the vagrant. “You’re at the end of a long life.”

“Don’t think I can even move.”

“This’ll be quick,” she says. “If you have something else to say, best say it soon.”

If he had eyes, she’s sure he’d be staring at her. But there isn’t an indecisive rattle, or anything to suggest he is still breathing, or aware of her in some way greater than anyone’s aware of their fading history.

She squeezes the trigger.